1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed generally to Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, and more particularly to a unidirectional USB port that allows the transmission of data signals from a first USB host to a second USB host and prohibits the transmission of data signals from the second USB host to the first USB host.
2. Description of Related Art
A widely used interface for connecting a “host” electronic or computing device to various “slave” peripheral devices (such as printers, modems, mice, keyboards, PDAs, game pads and joysticks, scanners, digital cameras, flash drives, personal media players, etc.) is the Universal Serial Bus (USB) interface. The USB interface is a bidirectional interface that currently supports three data rates—low speed (1.5 Mbits/sec), full speed (12 Mbits/sec), and high speed (480 Mbits/sec). The USB interface uses half-duplex differential signaling to combat the effects of electromagnetic noise on longer lines. Half-duplex differential signaling provides for bidirectional communication between a USB host and a USB slave, but only in one direction at a time. Two USB hosts cannot be directly connected with one another; rather, a USB host can only be connected with a USB slave through a USB interface.